1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the real-time simulation of physical interactions with a simulated surgical patient.
2. Description of Related Art
Despite the focus on creating surgical simulators for minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) procedures, most surgery is, and will continue to be, done through open-access incisions. The work done for MIS simulators does not readily transfer to open surgery. An open simulator is more complex than one for MIS because the surgeon interacts with the body in larger surgical fields via handheld tools and hands while directly observing his/her hand actions. This makes for potentially more complex tool-tissue interactions that encompass more anatomy than in MIS as well as for a different form of human user interface device configuration (e.g., stereo display and haptic devices) to enable direct visualization of the hands.
Much of open surgery activities involve a tool held in the physician's hand. The tool does the actual interaction with tissue. Thus, the force and moment felt by the physician through the handle of the tool are preferably reproduced to provide a more realistic experience. This force and moment combination is felt primarily through the proprioceptive stressing of the joints and force applied by the tool handles on the skin of the tool user. This is commonly referred to as haptic sensing and is helpful to accurate surgical skills.
Orthopedic surgical procedures when not being taught on patients or animals typically use artificial bones made of plastics and/or composite materials to allow them to be cut and drilled by real orthopedic tools. Sometimes these bones are placed within some type of soft tissue surrounding made of materials such as silicone rubber so that an approximation of soft tissue manipulation can also take place during the same session where the artificial bone is worked on. Such simulation destroys the patient surrogate (i.e., the artificial bone and soft tissue). For joint based surgery such as arthroscopy, MIS simulators can be used to teach some aspects of those procedures.